Activity 4 - The Schrdinger Equation

This is where we introduce some real quantum mechanics. The Schrdinger Equation describes the behaviour of particles in quantum physics, using the fact that they can be described as waves. The full time varying Schrdinger Equation requires knowledge of partial derivatives. However if we only look at the one dimensional, time independent Schrdinger Equation we can reduce this to ordinary derivatives and it takes the form:

. The hat on the H means that it is an operator: something which does something to a function. You can think of operators as lists of instructions. Here the operator is called the Hamiltonian, and tells us to take the second derivative with respect to x of , with the coefficients , and the potential function, , times A good introduction is found here: http://www.cavendish-quantum.org.uk/files/QM-Contents_Chapter-1.pdf which we highly recommend you study and understand. So what does Schrdingers time independent equation tell us? As you can see from the right hand side, it tells us the energy. Harder to see, but you might have noticed: the second derivative term is actually the kinetic energy term! You are used to seeing but this can also be written as The second derivative term here is just the quantum equivalent of the classical kinetic energy term. Finally, the potential term. This is different for each system, but usually comes in a form you are familiar with, e.g. the gravitational potential:

You see that, at least in its time independent form, Schrdingers equation is nothing more than a quantum mechanical equation for the energy! The final part, which we have ignored so far, is what is. We said it was a function: at this level that is the best way to think about it, we actually call it a wavefunction. It is a function that is different depending upon the system.

A nice example is a free particle, like an electron flying through space:

where the N is a normalisation coefficient, k is the wavevector: frequency: , for frequency

, and

is the angular

Again: if any of this is unfamiliar maths, we recommend the Cavendish Quantum Mechanics Primer, and visiting the Quantum Maths pages of this site. But wait a second: that equation has time in it! Yes: that was an equation for a travelling electron. If we didnt include time it couldnt be travelling. There are a wide range of very important cases however where we have a steady state situation, and the time component vanishes, leaving us with just the part of the exponent. These are cases like an electron in a deep potential well, or when around an atom. These problems form the core of the second year quantum physics course at Cambridge, but we will give one example of very strange quantum behaviour, which is important for explaining particle radioactive decay: quantum tunnelling.